


Some Kind of Miracle

by Indigo2831



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Angst, Anxiety Attacks, Complete, Drama, Episode Codas, Family Reunions, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Hurt Sam Winchester, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Protective Dean Winchester, Sam Can't Catch a Break, Tortured Sam Winchester, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-10 21:53:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28234227
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Indigo2831/pseuds/Indigo2831
Summary: AU Tag to 11.23, Alpha & Omega.  Spoilers through Season 12. Mary is alive. Sam has been taken. Castiel is missing. And Dean is reeling from it all. For the Winchesters, even miracles are complicated.
Comments: 4
Kudos: 60





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi, all! So I've mainly posted newer works here, but I've written fan fiction for years. I'm moving some of my works to this platform so I can close out another. This is one of my favorite stories because it gives Sam permission and agency to deal with what he's been through. It also explores the Sam-Mary relationship in ways the show never did. This story is already complete, so I'm going to give it a quick edit and post it all. 
> 
> Let me know what you think.

There are many sinister truths whispered and shouted about Sam Winchester in the backrooms of hunters' bars and over the curated weapons of trunk armories: he's the boy king, the devil's playmate, a hunter so deranged and dangerous he lays with demons.

Sam had spent years trying to wipe the slate clean, saving lives, often at his own detriment, to prove his questioned humanity. But at this moment when a blonde Brit with a tiny gun and massively distorted versions of the truth breaks-and-enters into his first-ever home—one that's still ripe with Lucifer's sadism and tainted grace—to interrupt his profound grief, Sam embraces them all.

Righteous, teeth-grinding rage and neon adrenaline create a powerful armor. The bullet that punches into the tender meat of his lower thigh barely stops his advance. Toni, all posh blazer and British elitism, actually squeaks when Sam expertly swats the gun out of her hand. She guffaws a wet, gummy grunt when Sam clocks her with his fist, not an open hand.

Guilt glints through him over hitting a woman, even a violent intruder. Some boy king.

And even strangely, the punch, one that has taken out hunters twice her size, crunches bloodily to her face but doesn't knock her down. Sam's hand is buzzing nonetheless, and he shakes it out, advancing again.

Sam doesn't doubt that she's expertly trained, but she never offers a counterattack. She opts to skitter out of his impressive reach, clutching her bloody nose as if she doesn't want to stain her pristine blouse, glaring, almost as if she's waiting...

He'd been braced for the pain of being shot, and it hits with the gentility of a fireball, but what truly scares him is the lack of coordination that follows. His intimidating prowl rapidly becoming a drunken, weaving lurch. A decaying numbness drifts upward and out from the bleeding hole in his thigh, like a destructive fog. It hacks through the armor of endorphins with a frightening precision, replacing kinetic prowess with a scorched earth of dying muscle. His lethally long legs wither beneath him, and he stumbles badly, barely catching himself on the back of one of the library's chairs.

Bemused, Toni relaxes her stance. "If you assumed I'm some simpering bookish coward, you thought wrong. I took precautions, Sam. I…"

"P-poisoned the bullet," Sam mumbles through tingling lips.

"Precisely."

It's a paralytic, and a supernatural one at that, judging by how efficiently it takes hold, and the niggling pain that piggybacks inability to move.

The bunker dissolves into sparkles and gleams of steel gray and marbled beige as the encroaching numbness infects his limbs and settles in his chest, affecting the muscles that enable it to expel and draw in air. Gravity shoves him to the ground in a sloppy and unchecked descent. The corner of the table juts uncomfortably into his ribs on the way down. The castors of the chair make a banshee-esque scrape over the tile as it's skittered aside by the force of his falling body. Sam smashes face-first into the marble floor. He flounders a bit, a pathetic flail of arms he can't feel out of sheer desperation. What he's reaching for, he's not sure. Dean is dead. Pink mist on the walls and an intrepid soul orbiting in The Empty. Castiel's been launched to the far reaches of the globe. And Sam's alone, shot, poisoned, and trying to breathe with lungs that can't fully expand.

Only minutes have passed, and yet Sam can't even twitch a finger or bat an eyelid, and he can feel the warmth of the blood pooling beneath his skewered, spasming thigh, the feather-light tickle of his desperate, ragged breaths against his outflung hand. He can see the tiny balls of dust from Dean's half-assed cleaning sessions and the worn black boots of another intruder.

The second figure is all muscles and surprising size, emerges from the shadows, binds him in chains and carries him out of the bunker.

-SPN-

Dean Winchester has spent lifetimes attempting and failing to live up to the golden standards heaped upon him by family, fate and circumstance-obedient son, protective older brother and a hunter worthy of being Michael's divine sword.

As Dean stands in the presence of his newly resurrected mother, he's certain that he's undeserving of this miracle, especially when riffing sarcastic about family togetherness to Amara was just a ploy that he lifted from Sam's diary and Sister Sledge.

Dean had faced fanged, sulfurous beasts with less than fanfare and panic than coming face-to-face with his now wholly alive mother. His brain shorts out like an overloaded circuit, and he stands in the darkness, all knocking knees and dropped jaw, stupefied and awed as his terrified mother sidles backward, regarding her son as a stranger.

A few wasted moments buzz by before love overwhelms his paralyzing shock. Dean lurches forward, shucking off his jacket to wrap around her shoulders. The brisk dampness of the night is a drastic difference from the humidity of the botanical garden. "It's okay," he says, voice breaking on the unspoken Mom. "You're fine, you're okay."

Except Mary Winchester had never been in a damsel, and she damn sure knew what to do in distress. Like their first meeting in 1973, Dean sees the determined jut of her jaw, feels a rush of air before he finds himself face-first in the muddy ground, face aching like it'd been punched.

His mother is enraged. "Did you get what you wanted?! From me? From my son!" She hollers, wrenching his arm expertly. The right application of pressure and Dean will need an orthopedic surgeon.

Dean's not sure if a heart can simultaneously soar and break, but it is. It leaves him lightheaded with elation and nauseous with dread. Because he has his mother back, and yet she thinks it's November 2, 1983, and doesn't recognize that the man in front of her is her son she's so worried for. "Don't be scared, okay? I just want to help you."

"There was a fire, and I need to get to my kids. Don't freakin' touch me, just get me to a phone." Mary slowly lets him go, giving him a wide berth as she searches for a weapon.

"Your kids are fine, Mary," Dean says and kicks himself when he hears how creepy that sounds.

Mary glares him at him with ever-deepening suspicion. "Don't think I don't know what you are! _Exorcizamus te, omnis immundus spiritus_ …"

Dean climbs to his knees, beseeching. "I'm not a demon," he assures her calmly.

"Then how do you know who I am? Who are you?"

"I'll explain everything, okay? There'll be time for that later. I'm your son. I'm Dean. Trust me, I know how bonkers that sounds." Dean stands, hands held up in surrender. "You named me after your mother, Deana. You used to make me tomato-rice soup when I was sick. You sang Aerosmith songs when you cleaned the house. You always said angels were looking over me, but I don't think you knew what giant douchebags..."

"Look, I know what's possible and impossible, more than the most, and this absolutely gonzo! My Dean is four years old! You don't think I'd k-know my own..." Mary laps into stunned silence as clouds part and the unblotted moonlight sets everything aglow. Squinting, Mary takes a step closer, and Dean doesn't flinch when she searches his features for kinship.

For the little boy she left behind.

"No no no!" Mary lets out a primal scream that curdles the blood, rattles the teeth, and makes Dean wonder if she were better off in Heaven. As she sobs, he wonders what it was.

He chances a step forward, unsure of what to do and fighting a nervous breakdown himself. He wishes Sam were here. He'd toss on the charm and soft, pillowy voice, and probably pull out an embroidered handkerchief for her to dab her tears.

Suddenly, Mary claws at his shirt. "I need to see, to make sure." Dean is shocked at the invasion of privacy, but he doesn't move. Then, it dawns on him what she's looking for, and he helps, tearing open his shirt and working his out of the sleeve.

He has an oddly shaped birthmark on the inside of his left biceps, a series of sandy brown blotches that look like a constellation. When Mary gave him a bath, she used to lovingly kiss it or goofily tickle it as she dried him off. He lifts his arm and shows her the trail of smudges that's always been there no matter how many times he's been remade. Mary gapes at it, and then him directly. He stoops a bit, and she cradles his face with trembling hands. "Dean."

He can't speak, his own eyes leaking as he embraces her with all the love and longing and grief amassed from thirty-three years without his mother.

Happiness and grief, regret and shock all funnel within him in a tangled tornado of emotions that Dean can't even attempt to suss out. It weaves its way into a peculiar creature Dean nor Mary, hunters young and old, aren't yet prepared to fight.

-SPN-

There's no celebration when Sam's naturally fast metabolism burns the paralytic out of his system. He's been subsisting reed-thin breaths for hours, and that has rendered him vaguely conscious and too mush-minded to keep track of vehicle speed or direction. As he takes greedy lungful of air, his awareness expands. Even in the darkness, he can see that he's been stuffed in the back of a pick-up truck with a hardcover top that's so low, it's as if he's lying in a violently trundling coffin.

Before Sam even has a chance to contemplate escape, the truck lurches to a stop, the engine dying. The mounting dread is a vicious living thing that leaves him nauseous and praying (to every deity except Chuck).

The cab of the cargo bed opens. A meaty hand grabs Sam's injured leg and drags him out of the darkness and into searing sunlight. The reflexive pain blots out any instinct to fight. His whimpers are muffled by a foul-tasting gag and are wholly ignored. Judging by the nonchalance of his kidnappers, Sam figures the only living thing nearby to hear him have four legs or wings.

Thanks to the blood loss, he's still merely a spectator to his abduction, watching through gritty eyes as he's hauled through an open pasture and into the derelict leavings of an abandoned farm.

He's stripped his wallet, cellphone, jacket, watch, and weapons.

His shoes and socks are removed.

His arms are cuffed behind his back and locked in chains; ankles bound to the wooden legs of a chair.

The barn, despite the rotted patches in the roof and the warped slats that allow sunlight and air to amble inside, is clean and orderly.

Toni Beville looms in front of him in her heels and wrinkled khakis, looking disappointingly healthy and composed for someone who just grappled with an experienced hunter twice her size. Whatever bruises he left have been covered in a seamless application of make-up and a treacherous simper. "I'd hoped we could have collected you in a more orderly manner, but I'm adaptable," Toni says.

Sam bites into the gag and ignores her.

"Now, let's try this again. I am from the British Chapter of the Men Of Letters. We bore witness you and your brother lay waste to your country, and while you Yanks may think we'd revel in America's demise, it's definitely a 'too big to fail' situation, so you had to be detained." She produces a tidy stack of composition notebooks.

Sam glares. His hunting journals are kept and updated the dark 'net, so other hunters can have access to life-saving Intel and lore. Those books are his personal journals, and contain the most candid thoughts about his disastrous adventure of his real life.

There are intimate revelations about Bobby and Jessica and Dean that he's never shared with anyone. Toni has studied them like a prosecutor preparing for trial, judging neon tabs extended from the pages and the stack piled in the far corner. "We have a lot to discuss so..."

The newly-restored sun is setting, and brisk air filters in through the drafty barn. Sam's only source of warmth is the rivulets of copper still snaking down his calf from his untreated leg. Toni's voice is quickly becoming an indecipherable drone of poshness, growing ever distant. As Sam's vision tints red, he knows that's passing out, and it's the only good thing that's happened to him today.

A crack splits the air, and Sam's head wobbles, his cheek burning. He blearily blinks, hissing at Toni, who is primed to slap him again but removes his gag instead. She holds a bottle of water in front of his face. "We do not have time to coddle your afflictions, Samuel. Drink."

When Sam doesn't immediately open his mouth, she grabs a fistful of hair, yanks his head backward, and pours the water over his mouth and nose. "Drink it or drown in it," she singsongs like an evil Mary Poppins.

Sputtering, Sam opts for the former.

"I suppose we can't have to bleeding to death either." She tears open his blood-crusted pants to fully expose the puffed, swollen entrance and exit wounds. It's ugly, jagged entrance, thanks to the close range, but the bullet was a small caliber and pierced the muscle cleanly. Sam would've stitched it up without the good drugs, and returned to work within a week.

But at least she's going to bandage it. For the time since he was abducted, Sam naively wonders if maybe this is just a terrible misunderstanding and that after hearing the unmitigated truth, they'll let him go.

Sam had spent his entire life as the dreamer and who was alienated from the family business and the actual family. John and Dean excelled at and accepted hunting because they both remembered and cherished their mother. Sam couldn't share their grief and only grew to resent them for it for forcing him to make incredible sacrifices because of it.

The youngest Winchester was an innate academic who liked security and his weapon of choice would always be knowledge and history over rock salt and shotguns. So when he discovered that he was a legacy of a storied and secret organization founded to preserve and protect priceless supernatural information and archives, he finally found his place within family, and was able to accept hunting as his profession. Toni had to know from reading his journals that he was a good person and a proud Man Of Letters.

The second his eyes lock on the blue-orange flame extending from the tip of a blowtorch, all of Sam's short-lived and reluctant hope dies. He struggles against his unyielding bonds. "Toni, don't."

His arms are handcuffed behind his back so cinched so tightly he can't even flex his wrist without the metal cutting into it. He does it anyway.

She's heating a rubber-handled spoon over the flame, and soon it's vibrant, humming orange. Dignity be damned, Sam pleads. "I'm cooperating! I will tell you everything you want to know. Please don't do this! We're on the same side! PLEASE!"

Toni makes a vulgar sound of disgust. "I am on the side of justice, of faith...of humanity! The only thing worse than a villain is a villain who fancies himself a hero."

When she presses the smoldering spoon over the puncture in his leg, Sam howls, body shuddering against it. Plumes of smoke dance upward, carrying the unforgettable scent of his own cooking flesh. The torment overrides even autonomous functions, and he stops breathing. His guttural screams veer into inaudible octaves of pure misery. The pain doesn't end when she stops to re-heat the spoon. It reverberates through him in pulsing neon waves that make his teeth chatter.

Toni shifts in leg, and repeats the process for the exit wound. He vomits, hoping to get her in the splatter, and hates that he's still conscious.

Through it all, Toni's never demonstrates a scintilla of remorse. When she's finished, she leaves the wound uncovered and smoking, the holes sealed with burnt blood and crusted flesh that looks like over-seared steak.

She produces a syringe and an unlabeled vial of drugs. "I believe we have bloody work to do."

-SPN-

The first memory Dean has of riding in the Impala with his mother is thirty-three years after her fiery death.

The mother is twenty-nine and the son is thirty-seven.

Dean strangles Baby's steering wheel in an attempt to ground himself as pterodactyls swarm in his stomach.

Beside him, Mary clings to the doorhandle of the passenger seat, possibly in an attempt to do the same. She hasn't spoken in twenty miles, and Dean's doing everything he can do to endure the palpable tension. She's in shock, and is entitled to it. He focuses on the road and getting back to the bunker. Every ounce of his being into not thinking about when climbed out of his own grave missing four months and a little brother.

Sam.

He dials him without taking his eyes off the road, working from muscle memory. Sam, of course, doesn't answer. "First rule: Answer you damn phone. I ain't dead. Call me NOW."

"Is John...alive?" Mary idly wonders, still staring aimlessly.

Dean grimaces. "No," Dean replies softly. "He's not."

Mary sniffles beside him, wiping her eyes. Dean feels like an ass when he realizes he's never asked her if she's hungry or thirsty. He's about to when she theorizes, "the fire killed them then?"

His eyebrows climb. "What? Oh, no! He passed 'bout nine years ago. On the job, saving me."

"On the job? What do you...?"

Dean waits until he has her full attention to declare, "He was a hunter. He fell into the life after you...ya know, and raised us in it." It's everything she didn't want for him and Sam, but he's not ashamed. Mary doesn't break down this time. She just looks dazed and angry. "I'm proud of what I do. Dad wanted his revenge, his justice, but it became a hell of a lot more than that. We saved a lot of lives on the way. In your honor."

Mary scoots away from him, bending until her head is thunks against the door, shutting him out. And Dean decides to stop at the first decent motel they find, so she can rest and process before heading to the bunker.

When she's shivering and silent six tense miles later, Dean reaches blindly in the backseat, proud in a relatively clean hoodie. "You can slip into that until we can get you some real clothes, okay?"

She presses her face into the gray cotton, breathing in the scent of girly shampoo and after-shave. The sleeves slip comically over her hands and the sweatshirt puddles in her lap. It's not much smaller than the billowing pink nightgown. Dean's mouth climbs upward.

"This is like wearing a blanket," she sighs, her voice is light as if she wants to laugh, but doesn't remember how. "Is this yours?"

For the first time since reuniting, Dean feels the unblemished happiness that should accompany such a miracle. "Nope," he beams. "It's Sam's."


	2. Chapter 2

Chapter 2

Dean stares at the vibrant rows of rainbow-hued selections of beverages in the rest stop cooler, and bites his lip.

He doesn't remember what his mother likes to drink.

He's delirious with something akin to happiness, but it's also lined with an edge of unfathomable fear. What if she hates the man he's become? What if she's disgusted by what he's capable of? What if she never recovers from losing John?

Dean pushes that from his mind and instead scans the nutritional facts of each one. He dismisses purple and green drinks, because they look disgusting and unnatural. He nixes the energy drinks too. He's fairly certain they didn't even exist in 1983. Bottled lattes are axed for the same reason.

He decides on a cup of caffeine and buys two: standard black and one of the girly sugary ones that Sam likes. And while he's thinking about it, he fires off a profane text to Sam for not answering his phone, and walks up and down the aisles, tossing things into his little basket. Lip glosses, candy bars, deodorant, hair clips, magazines, toothbrushes, lady razors. Does his mother wear make-up?

Dean's comparing two eyeshadow quads when Mary ventures down the aisle after her trip to the bathroom, that damned nightgown bundled under one arm. She's wearing a pair of Charlie's jeans from her go-bag he hadn't had the heart to burn, his Queen t-shirt, and is swaddled in Sam's hoodie that refuses to part with. Mary seems steadier and calmer as she approaches. Dean wants to hug her again, maybe never let go, but he abstains. "Sunburnt Smokes or Pure Romance?"

Mary studies the disarrayed contents of his cart. "Neither...what...on earth are you doing?"

Dean frowns and shrugs innocently. "I'm just, um. I'm helping?"

Mary seems amused, fighting a smile. She peers up at him fondly, hand pressed over heart. "You're so handsome...I never thought. You looked like a frog when you were a kid," She admits, and Dean barks a shocked laugh. So that's why John called him "his little hopper" until he was 10. "And you'd do the same thing then. You thought you were helping, but you were making a freakin' mess. You were so serious, too. I never minded." Mary pats his arm and sorts through the basket. "Let's save you a little money, okay?" Dean's not sure what a Mom Voice is, but he thinks this gentle-firm tone edged with exasperation might be it.

She clears out the basket, and Dean catalogs every preference and dislike. Mary never liked fashion magazines. She seems to prefer any color other than pink or red. She takes her coffee black with sugar. And she likes Pepsi, not Coke; turkey, not ham.

Mary tugs him towards the register, impatiently helps pack the bags, and hurries to the car while Dean's pocketing his receipt, tossing a "Hurry up, Dean!" over her shoulder.

She's impatient to get to her son.

Dean beams when he walks out of the store, into the lavender gleam of dawn, and laughs, "I'm coming, Mom."

-SPN-

Sam likes the drugs. They're medicinal fireworks, flashing bright and loud in his bloodstream, distracting from the trepidation and prettying up the pain.

He can sleep with them too, and he takes full advantage of even a few moments of unconsciousness even though Toni slaps, shocks or strangles him awake.

Sam, with all of his experience on the flipside of this equation, quickly learns that lying or even omitting truths does not work in his favor. The truth is slippery, and everywhere. It yearns to be free. Sam's psychic powers may have diminished greatly, but he's always been wired with an ethereal strength, an odd aversion to supernatural curses or mind-altering drugs. He could fight this one if he wanted to. Toni's other means of persuasion are extremely convincing.

The interrogations sessions last for hours. Or is it days? It's hard to keep track when your existence consists of chains, a chair and the banal barn where you'll probably die, but the drugs at least make enduring the invasive, battering probes into the worst, most nightmarish times of his life—Mary. His childhood. Jessica's death. Special kids. John. Dean's deal—easier to handle.

He speaks until there's no moisture left in his mouth or words in his brain, until they've dissected and examined the haunted corners of his lifetimes, and he's sore-throated and dehydrated.

Toni's pale face is all hard angles and hatred, even if the thin lips are arranged in a chilling facsimile of a smile. "So after your brother was slaughtered by hellhounds, what did you do?"

Niggling itches slither across his skin and water floods his eyes. He's alive with amplified sensations, the unrelenting cinch of the handcuffs, the leaden weight of the chains, the vibrant throb of his skewered leg, the thunderous cadence of Toni's voice. Freshly dosed, Sam can't remember how to operate his mouth. And his neck has turned to mush, his head is a boulder, rolling down the plane of his body. All he can see is Dean's chest shredded by claw marks, the ivory glow of bone and fat. He gags on the memory, "s-started training with Ruby-"

"The demon," Toni amends.

"...to get stronger, so d-do more...tried to turn my curse into something good."

"So you formed an alliance with the very monsters that slaughtered your entire family most recently the brother..." Toni regards him as some beastly thing...a freak, a junkie, a murderer. "How did you get stronger, Samuel?"

She's circling him, the rhythmic click of her heels only accelerating the already lopsided beat of his heart. She holding a long cylinder of wood with a rubber handle and whacks the skeleton of the chair with it. She's tickled when Sam, who's drugged out of his gourd, jerks. Sam's not sure if he's more frightened of the weapon or her judgment. He hesitates by licking his lips and fumbling over his words. "I wanted to save more people. He made me promise to keep hunting."

"And that's very noble, Sam, but you're stalling."

Sweat drips into his eyes. "I d-drank demon blood."

Toni thrusts the cattle prod into his ribs, zapping the tender flesh there. He absorbs the surge of fluid pain that bows his spine. "You deserve this, Samuel."

And it becomes a mantra spoken with the reverence of a prayer every time she hurts him. And when he doesn't subscribe to her sadistic faith and repeat it (the drugs reinforce her truth) she gets the blowtorch and the spoon, an ice-pick or a knife.

Sam understands now, as he's writhing and rutting out the anguish of yet another burn that this isn't an interrogation. It's a MOL-sanctioned execution of spirit before the body.

She leaves him, the lock of the door behind him spells that she won't be coming back for a while. Night renders the barn pitch dark and worryingly cold, but Sam doesn't care. Exhaustion drags his head down, chin to chest. With a fleeting thought of his brother, Sam sleeps.

Sam slams into consciousness with an operatic inhale as he's pummeled by a deluge of frigid, rusty water from above. Gurgling and dazed, he tries to dive from the chair to escape, forgetting he's cuffed and chained, and only manages to fray his wrists even more ragged and jostles his already aching gunshot wound. The harsh spray plasters his hair to his forehead and into his eyes, soaks his clothes and chokes him.

The water disappears as abruptly as it appeared. Sam looks upward, head bobbing to dodge the errant stream of water to see a rudimentary piping system and a sprinkler erected just over his head. "Welp, they thought of everything," he sighs with lethal sarcasm.

He shakes his head like a dog, wiggling his body to rid himself of as much puddling water as he can. It's a futile attempt to lessen the intended cooling effect, but it's already taken hold. Goosebumps prickle every inch of his skin, and he's trembling in a matter of moments, and it only intensifies by the minute.

Hypothermia is a tidy method of torture. It muddies the mind, weakens to body and shatters the resolve without getting too messy. Except Sam Winchester is depressingly familiar with torture and the depravity of the beings that do it. He bows his head, flexes his fingers and toes to maintain circulation. He closes his eyes and sinks deep into his subconscious. It's less of a mediation and more of a mental escape. In the cage, when Michael and Lucifer warred against each other instead of ganging up on him, Sam used to gather whatever pieces of himself he could, and check out, erecting high-def dreams of a wonderfully imperfect life in which he married Jess had three kids and lived across the street from Dean and his family. Their wives were best friends. It's loud and chaotic and decadently normal.

Sam snaps back to his gruesome reality of convulsing muscles and dangerous cold.

Dean is dead. 

The love of his brother is what's powered him through from horrific obstacle to the next. If it were up to Sam, he never would've left that dirty demon's trap of Cold Oak or he would've kept his appointment with Death after closing the gates.

Sam had made grand speeches to Dean about choices and agency and had honored his brother's decision to become a supernatural suicide bomber, and face Amara alone. And now, if he could change anything about his life, he would've gone with him.

Pain, Sam knows, is an assault on the physical body, and while he's shackled, it's still escapable. Loss, however, is an imprint on the soul, a weeping wound that diffuses to the marrow of his bones, drapes of black veil in his DNA. Sam has recovered and survived Lucifer's torment, demon blood addiction, Jessica's death, all because of Dean. That touchpoint is gone, and Sam did nothing to stop it.

The grief hurts more than any wound Toni can inflict.

Sam doesn't even know why he's fighting anymore.

He cries with ragged, silent sobs until he's so brittle from the cold and so depleted from interrogation that he passes out.

But the water blasts on and off again randomly throughout the night.

Torture. Rinse. Repeat.

-SPN-

Fifteen minutes out from the bunker, and neither Sam nor Castiel is answering their phone. Dean's not sure how his little brother will handle their long-dead mother's return, and he'd love to avoid him attacking with her a demon blade or the soggiest chick flick moment of the millennium.

He's also unshakably paranoid. Winchester Law usually means that with every divine miracle comes a tragedy, with Sam's life footing the bill.

He listens to Mary's nervous chatter about how much she hates modern cars, and tamps down the dread that leaving him sweating in his jacket.

When he arrives at the bunker, he slips in front of his mother as they proceed down the stairs, so she won't see him brandishing his weapon. He doesn't even reach the landing before he sees the upended furniture and smells blood. He hopes Sam, thinking Dean had died, had just gotten drunk and sloppy, but Sam has never been that lucky. "Mom, get upstairs," he growls.

"Wait, why?"

"Got a bad feelin' is all."

Mary grips him by the nape of his neck, nails digging in, and shoves him down the last four steps. "Where's Sammy?"

"This bunker's massive. And he's probably upset or somethin'. Let me clear this place and I'll come get you."

Mary leans over his shoulder, seeing the gun and Dean's expression, and her entire demeanor hardens. Once they're on the landing, she swipes one of Dean's throwing knives fluidly from the table. "You're forgetting who I am, Dean. We'll clear it together. Lead the way."

It's a bizarre turn of fate that Mary covers Dean's six as they sweep the bunker. It's sadly typical that they only find a sickening pool of blood and a trail that leads up the stairs and unfamiliar footprints.

Sam was taken.

Dean falls to his knees, head in his hands.

Mary explodes with rage, hurling the knife into the mahogany across the room and flinging a lamp off the table with a blood-curdling scream and a shattering of glass.

-SPN-

Sam's only means of marking the passage of time is by the cyclic actions of his captors: interrogation or haunted solitude, freezing and drenched or damp and delirious, doped up or coming down.

He is fairly certain they're experimenting on him too, swapping out truth serums for man-made uppers that make his heart beat so fast he vibrates with false energy and supernatural elixirs manifest horrific pain or violent hallucinations. Or maybe that's just because the demonic sprinkler system won't let him sleep.

Sam's high again, twitched and searching for the inky taloned things that lurk in his periphery as he answers questions about Lucifer. Toni is unhappy with his answers, and Sam's fairly certain it's because he's speaking Enochian just to piss her off.

He's not broken yet, but he's careening towards that cliff with depressing speed. He thinks he should be stronger than this. Though, if Dean were alive, maybe he'd be able to hold himself together or fight harder. But it was always going to end this way: bloody and gruesome. Sam's had enough reigns at being the last Winchester standing. At least he knows the light at the end of the tunnel is a train and not another deal or malicious twist in the road. And despite his good intentions, he's wrought more death and destruction onto this world than good. He let his brother stroll into his own demise for the second time.

The sulfurous creature descends from the darkness and curls up at his side, all black eyes and stitched-over mouth. Sam finally realizes that it's his shadow, a true reflection of his scarred, monstrous soul. Wreaking and scarred from years of his inadvertent deceit and treachery.

"You deserve this, Sam," Toni declares. The thing nods.

Sam obediently leans into the penance of the cattle prod's shock.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please note this chapter is a little more violent than the others. I think it's in line with show-levels of violence, but reading always feels different. 
> 
> Thanks for the support!

The treasured sanctity of their bunker has been violated by every demon, archangel and witch in a 100-mile radius, so Dean doesn't even know where to start. Whoever or whatever it was, they're hip to Enochian blood sigils. His blood runs cold at the thought of Lucifer returning to exact some sick revenge on his favorite vessel, though he thinks that the walls would be festooned with Sam's innards of that were true. And they're both still warded against that.

Dean tries to block out his emotions and work it like a case. There was no forced entry, so whoever broke in had a key. And the key had been protected to the death for centuries. Dean isn't as familiar with the Men of Letters archives as Sam is, but he wades through the files exhaustively, inching deeper and deeper into the bowels of the bunker until he's reading by flashlight and fending off spiders so large they should be paying rent. Finally, he finds a moth-eaten, handwritten document that looks older than the constitution marking the inception of the Egyptian, Italian and British chapters of the Men Of Letters, and later notices of keys being struck and shared with all chapters. "You sons of a bitches."

Dean calls Crowley and Rowena, and orders them to haul ass because "I took the soul bomb for the team, and you owe me."

For someone who was understandably shaken by her resurrection after 30 years, the death of her husband, and now the abduction of an adult son she's never met, Mary is more composed than Dean could've hoped. She held together with seething anger, and he finally feels the kinship.

He finds her in Sam's room standing near the doorway. Dean raps a fist against the door just so he won't startle her. "Sam's not much of a decorator." It's a lame attempt at humor, and she humors him with a crooked smile.

She kicks one of the three trunks of books at the foot of the bed. "Is this storage or..."

"Nah, Sammy goes through books like crap through a goose. Half of those aren't even in English." All Dean wants to do is to be a son again, to have someone older and wiser tell him that it'll be okay, but not for the first time, he remembers that chronologically, that's still him. "I called in a few favors. We're gonna get him back. We just have to wait 'til they get here."

"Sammy can't afford to wait!" Mary wails with clenched fists. Her neck flushes with patchy crimson blotches belying her otherwise placid demeanor. "We don't know what they're doing to him or if..." she trails off with a literal bite of her tongue.

"Hey, look at me, I get it." Dean grips Mary by her shoulders and gives her a minute to ride out the cresting waves of panic. "When you...left, he was this tiny little baby, and that's how you still see him. But he's a man now. Bigger than me, and freakin' strong. He was trained by a half-crazy Marine named John Winchester and a paranoid widower alcoholic. Believe me, I'm climbing out of my skin to get too, but if anyone can survive, it's Sam. We just gotta hang in there a little longer."

"Jeez, Dean, I'm supposed to be your mother, and yet you're the one talking me down."

"First splinter I get I'll come running for a kiss and a band-aid, promise," Dean promises with a forced smile.

"How long have you used humor to hide emotion?" Mary asks, squinting.

Dean blinks, unsure of what to say. "Just started."

Mary rolls her eyes. "The apple didn't fall too far from the tree, I see. Do you hug, though? Because I really need one."

Dean doesn't hesitate. "I've been wanting to do this for thirty years. You never have to ask."

"Good to know," Mary mumbles into his shirt before pulling away.

Sniffling, Mary surveys the room, and Dean hopes she's not seeing the impersonality of their home. Up until recently, Dean loved the bunker, and he thought of it as his own personal Batcave. He will again once he scrubs the devil's fingerprints off every surface and installs a kick-ass supernatural security system. Seeing it through the eyes of the woman who lovingly decorated their home with sunny yellow paint and handmade curtains and painstakingly chosen knick-knacks, it looks like a prison or army barracks.

Mary grabs Sam's pillow, hugging it, and Dean can see the nineteen-year-old girl he met before, full of frustration, hope and spitfire when she lifts an eyebrow at the loaded gun stowed beneath it. She settles a little but grows wistful. "I didn't ask about him before because I'd convinced myself that the fire got him too. I couldn't bear to hear you say that...that you grew up without him," Mary begins.

Her confession triples the emotional heft of Mary's death because she died thinking her son and husband had too. Dean swallows around the lump in his throat and bites his cheek to avoid breaking down himself. He's been splayed open and raw since Mary's return, and the vulnerability is both foreign and exhausting.

"Tell me about Sammy," Mary asks breathlessly.

Dean props himself on the edge of the bed and can't fathom how to begin. He starts with a soft smile. "Even though he has no reason to be with all the shit that's been thrown at him, Sammy has the biggest heart in the entire world. He's the best person I know..."

Since their reunion, Dean has only skimmed the surface of their lives and tries to cushion the truth as much as possible in order to lessen the impact. But if there's anything that Dean loves more than beer and classic rock and the Impala, it's bragging about his little brother. Mary listens intently, and it distracts them from spinning out imagining the horrors of what Sam's possibly going through, and the agony of waiting.

Some time later, Dean hears an echo of a dainty Scottish brogue from the distance. "Calvary's arrived."

He bolts down the hall to find Rowena in an emerald green ball gown and golden cape draped seductively on the library table like an old-timey lounge singer at a Diagon Alley piano bar. "Damn if you're not a sight for sore eyes, Deano. Guess ya didn't go splat after all. Pity."

"I'm alive. I look fantastic. It's a miracle, whatever," Dean says flatly. "Make with the mojo already! I need-"

"To locate the giant, I know. I'm just savoring the moment, dear. Wasn't that long ago that your ogre of a brother locked me up in chains. I have it on good authority that the shackles have turned. Karma is in fact a bigger bitch than me." Rowena says, delighted.

"You've got three seconds to..."

Dean hears the shrill hiss of a blade whiz dangerously close to his ear and snick through Rowena's luxurious hair in a streak of silver and a puff of red. A sizeable clump of auburn flutters to the table. Rowena jerks so badly, she tumbles off the table, skirt flying over her head.

Dean's mother stalks into view, Sam's gun in her hand.

Rowena scowls first at a shorn hair and then at Mary. "Don' know who you are, lassie, but you've made a grave error drawing the ire of an all and powerful witch."

"I heard you talkin' about big bitches, and here I am: Mary Winchester. If you value the rest of your cheaply dyed hair or your teeth, you'll stop wasting time and find. my. son."

Dean crosses his arms over his chest. "And you thought I was scary."

Rowena squeaks, and hurriedly sweeps up the clumps of hair and stuffs it in one of the pockets hidden in the folds of her billowing skirt. "I can reattach those later. I'll need sandalwood candles and a bit of Winchester blood. I can take care of the rest."

Ten minutes later, the Impala speeds out of the bunker to rescue their own.

-SPN-

They're digging a grave.

Any half-decent hunter would immediately recognize the stab-and-scrape of spaded shovel meeting dirt. His eyes stray to the left, and through the slats, he sees slices of field surrounding the compound, sunshine and the rhythmic shock of black dirt against blue sky.

Sam hopes they salt and burn him first. He doesn't want to come back.

Sam's nothing more than a study of misery, his body an evidence log of depravity. There's an anvilous weight on his chest, and he spends most of his dwindling energy coughing brokenly and wheezing around it.

Toni arrives as Sam's trying to summon the courage to examine his singed leg.

She's been at this as long as he has, and though she has a far better position, she never seems to tire. She has the audacity to offer him a smile as she sets up. Sam lets his head fall, shutting her out. Water glides off his hair and splatters into his damp lap. He's not sure if that's from the sprinkler above his head or if sweat from his fever.

"Mark of Cain. Let's delve into that, Samuel," Toni says pleasantly like she's beginning a college lecture. She looks the part in a blazer with gold buttons, though pretty sure his Stanford professors brandished laser-pointers instead of ice-picks.

Sam fights a coughing fit as she circles him, and he tries not to show the ingrained fear. He knows what's coming. Everything with Toni is a ritual, so she'll feed him, drug him and interrogate him. The upside is he's pretty confident he won't survive another round of drugs.

There's a rattle of chains and a release of pressure. Sam groans in relief as his hands are uncuffed and unchained. The pain of being restrained for hours on end had been reduced to an unpleasant and muted ache in the wake of other thunderous pains. His hands are bloated and numb and dangle deadly at his sides. Sensation returns in a symphony of prickles and stings, and he rides it out with gritted teeth and clenched eyes.

His throat is raw and inflamed from screaming and overuse. Just whispering feels like tearing at an already weeping wound, but he knows what'll happen if he doesn't. "Was a necessary evil," Sam rasps. The sounds that emerge are rusted like the brittle crunch of desiccated leaves.

When he can somewhat feel his arms, he props his hands upright to help re-circulate the blood that's pooled in his swollen fingers. His wrists are sliced deeply from the too-small cuffs and are crusted in dried blood, but oddly clear of infection. He says nothing when Toni loosely cuffs his right forearm to the arm of the chair.

Once Sam can grip, he's given a black banana that's verging on rotten. It's a feast compared to the foul-tasting gel they forced down his throat when he refused to eat. The weight of the too-sweet fruit in his long barren belly makes him nauseous, but the nutrients broaden his awareness and clear his blurred vision. But the strangest fruit of them all is that his torturer wants Sam to live more than he does.

This is a reward, but Sam isn't fooled.

A syringe jabbed into his neck with a vicious pinch.

Outside, they continue to dig.

The deep dive into Abaddon's death and the Mark of Cain is more brutal than the other sessions. Toni's interpretation of events once again paints Dean as a depraved psychopath. "So _Deeean_ blindly agreed to take on this demonic without knowing what its history, that it was a great lock from the darkness?"

His brother's name in her mouth chafes like acid on tender skin.

Sam's heart hammers so intensely, it's pounding grooves into the backside of his breast bone. The stimulants are so volatile in Sam's weakening body that he shakes with it, overwhelmed by the manufactured energy and freeing outrage. "Is it a British custom to see everything backward? You have all the information and yet you're miles from the truth."

Toni glares a warning. "Enlighten me."

"Abaddon strutted right into the Men of Letters headquarters in 1958, and then time-warped to the future, because might study the supernatural, you couldn't even protect yourselves. My grandfather died trying. My brother took on The Mark to stop the demon that slaughtered the entire American chapter of your organization." Once Sam starts, he can't stop. And it's taken the continued besmirching of his dead brother's name to ignite anything within him that's stronger than the grief and the shame. "You've known and observed everything for centuries. You yourself tracked us from when? The devil's gate? The 66 seals? You have priceless intel and an international reach and what have you actually done to help anyone?!" Sam's panting now, so angry, the interior of this godforsaken barn is nothing but a bright, throbbing red.

Toni's is stone-faced during his speech. "Are you quite finished?" At Sam's silence, she rises from the leather ottoman she sits primly on when she's not flogging him. "You can plead your case a million times over, and it won't change what you are or what you've done. It won't change the outcome here. I cannot have you, a demon blood addict, a man who lies with monsters, a 'hunter' who has been at ground zero for every supernatural disaster in the last dozen years, continue to pervert the good name of the Men of Letters and the very concept of justice. I don't care what you think or how you feel," Toni explains. "Samuel, your job here is to answer questions with facts, not emotions. My superiors have authorized far more treacherous information-gathering tactics, and I've refrained. If you'd like me to oblige them, I'm happy to do so. You really only need a functioning mouth to talk."

Without warning, Toni snatches him by the throat so fiercely his head cracks audibly on the back of the chair. She uses two fingers to spread open his right eye. The cool tip of the ice-pick settles beneath the bottom lid primed to shuck the eyeball out like an oyster. Sam nearly wets himself. He attempts to hold his ravaged body as still as he can in order to save his eye.

"You. Don't. Need. This." She seethes, punctuating each word with a treacherous increase in pressure.

The tip pierces his lower lid, propping against his eyeball. It's a peculiar and petrifying sensation that penetrates the din of half-dying pleas, revolting terror and drug-addled haze to allow the birth of one definitive thought: I'm not dying here.

His clumsy hands open and close fruitlessly at his sides as he bites his quivering cheek so hard he tastes blood.

His left arm is free.

"Are we quite clear, Samuel?" Toni asks.

If he moves, the ice-pick will break into his eyeball like a butter knife through a soft-boiled egg. Sweating, Sam manages a whimper between clenched teeth. Satisfied, Toni eases the blade out of his face. Blood squirts down his cheek like cartoonish tears, and the eye burns from the inside out, the lid immediately swelling. She squeezes his throat, nearly cutting off his oxygen completely, just because she can. Sam parts his lips, laboring for breath, eyes locked with the cruel blue of his abductor's, and it only bolsters Sam's resolve. He doesn't care if he dies one inch over the property line, it's not happening by these hands in squalor without dignity.

Strung out and on God-knows-what and terror so potent he can barely formulate a coherent thought, Sam knows he doesn't have the luxury of planning an attack beyond gulping in as much air as he can. Then he allows two decades of instinct and training take over. He rockets forward to headbutt Toni with all of his stowed rage. Even as his forehead collides with hers, she capitalizes on her honed rapid reflexes and stabs him in the chest with the ice-pick still gripped in her hand. Sam barely feels it. He uses his free arm to fend her off with a wild punch while throwing his weight back to propelling himself and the chair out of her reach while taking the ice-pick with him to prevent her from reclaiming it.

Toni collapses to the ground, dazed, but begrudgingly conscious enough to call for help. Sam tries to stand but his ankles are still bound to the chair.

Awareness isn't a luxury they've afforded him, but Sam knows there are other people there. He's just not sure how many. There's a bald, black guy who doesn't speak much. He's Toni's muscle and despite his intimidating size, he doesn't seem to have the stomach for the torture, slipping out of his periphery when Toni gets violent. There might be others, but Sam only knows them as echoes of voices with theatrical cockney accents. He hears them when he's delirious from the hypothermia or sleep deprivation, and he's not entirely convinced they're real. The impending footsteps are a great indicator that they are.

He changes tactics and rocks side-to-side, using his own momentum and gravity to tip the chair. On the fourth thrust, he topples over, his considerable weight lands on his cuffed right arm, and the bones break with a distinct crack and shove the ice-pick into his chest to the hilt. Without the pressure on planted feet, the bindings slacken enough that Sam can work his legs free. With an agonized scream, Sam pulls out the ice-pick and wields it like a weapon.

The door rattles with muffled shouting and the rattle of keys as they try to unlock the door, but Sam's still chained to that damn chair by his right arm. With a flicker to Toni, who's still flat on her back, Sam uses bloody ice-pick to attack the wedge open one of the chain links to the handcuffs. Sweat obscures his vision and haste adds an extra tremor to his hands as Sam works. Sam's head whips to the door when he hears the distinct sound of a key being inserted into a lock. He opts for brute strength over finesse and breaks off the arm with a well-leveraged twist just as the door opens, and Toni's muscle enters the room.

Sam kicks the chair with his good leg, and it careens against the door and smashes into the shoulder of the intruder. He staggers to his feet, standing for the first time in days, and lopes over to the door to heave his diminished weight against it. Even doped, Sam, who's been extensively tortured and starved, isn't strong enough to win a battle of brawn against multiple, healthy guards. They push him back a foot in a matter of seconds. If they make it inside, Sam knows death will be the most favorable and least likely outcome.

Featureless faces loom in the opening, and Sam stabs at them, first with the ice-pick and then with the jagged wooden edge of the chair arm dangling from his wrist. He aims for vulnerable locations, like necks and bellies with no remorse. There's a misting of blood, a few bitten off screams, and a thump of a dropping body before the door falls shut. Sam snags the chair with his foot and wedges it beneath the knob, barricading them inside.

Behind him, he can hear the shift-and-slide of Toni moving, the creaking of wood as she uses the worktable to pull herself upright, and he whirls around just as she swings the wrong end of the cattle prod at his head. The wooden handle connects with enough power to knock him back against the door and shoot stars throughout his vision, which was newly compromised by cascading blood. Those stars morph into lightning bolts as Toni finds the business end of the cattle prod and puts it to gruesome work. It's electrical misery that paralyzes him and sends him collapsing to the wet floor like a felled redwood.

Sam can do miraculous things—be possessed by multiple supernatural entities or recite exorcism backward on the fly—but he can't overpower or outsmart electricity. The current fries him, body spasming like an epileptic, and he hopes this shock isn't the one that stops his heart.

When it ends, Sam can only lie there, barely conscious, racked by tremors of overcooked muscles and choking on the foamy gunk that floods his mouth and throat. Cold fingers dig into his neck in a search for life. Toni mutters something nasty Sam can't discern over the high-pitched wail echoing in his ears, but rises and heads to the worktable. His twitching fingertips brush against the smooth knob of the icepick. He squeezes his eyes shut in concentration as he tries to regain any semblance of motor control. His fingers scuttle forward by the millimeter, like the legs of a spider, until he's palming it. Toni looms above him sooner than he expected and kicks him hard once, twice. Sam rocks limply from the rib-bending blows. She opts to stomp on him the next time, the stiletto heel of her classic heels gouging a bloody hole low in his belly. Though agonizing, the beating gives him another few seconds to recover coordination.

He has no choice but to react when he sees the watery visage of a gleaming silver syringe above.

His second mounted attack is drunken and sloppier than the first but more devastating when he jams the ice-pick into the complicated collection of bones and ligaments of Toni's ankle and wrenches it sideways. Even if he dies here, she will always have a crippling reminder of Sam Winchester.

Toni screams are blood-curdling. Torturers can almost never take even a fraction of the punishment they dole out. Sam snags the discarded cattle prod and thrusts it into her chest. She shakes like a paint can in a mixer and is unconscious before she hits the floor.

Behind him, the tip of an axe pierces the heavy wooden door. Sam's running out of time. He tries to stand again, but even his good leg buckles immediately. Crying out, he slumps back to the ground in a hopeless heap. Electrocution has fritzed away the empowering drugs and endorphins, leaving him vulnerable to the rigors of the fight and the trauma of sustained abuse.

And just like that, the hunter, bowed by days of torture and a lifetime of tragedy, breaks. Sam wills everything including his heart to just stop. He wishes he could join Dean wherever he is. He wishes he was never born.

Dean, however, will always be a part of him. He's always heard his voice in his head just as much his own. _Keep goin', Sammy. Kick it in the ass._ Despite some extra demon blood, they're forged from the same iron stock. If Dean can ingest millions of souls and die for the sake of the world, for Sam, maybe Sam can hang on for just a little longer.

He can't stand, so he army-crawls on a broken arm, dragging the cuff, the piece of the chair, and his uncooperative legs with him until he reaches the far wall of the barn. He places a hand futilely against the slats. They're sun-baked and eroded and all but crumble when he taps them. Behind him the door rumbles and the whole head of the axe makes it through. He has a matter of seconds.

Sam's size is often misleading. Though he towers above most men and is impressively strong, he is also a deceptively fast runner and weirdly flexible. He wedges himself in the slip of the space between the wall and the worktable. Once there, he breaks the weakened wood with his elbow until he makes a hole just wide enough for him to ferret through. He hopes the table will disguise his retreat and at least buy him a few minutes headstart.

There's little moonlight for Sam to navigate as he slithers through the tall grasses and thorned weeds, and away from the barn. The air is abundant and sweet, and Sam swallows down as much as he can, though it's becoming harder and harder to fill his burning lungs. Shards of sharp rock and branches gouge into his forearms as he moves, but Sam's encouraged by the concealing height of the overgrowth and obscuring darkness. If he can't run, he'll hide until he can. He keeps moving until he hits open air and falls head-first into a hole.

He lands in an awkward jumble, coughing and wheezing on puffs of disturbed dirt. He tries to right his body, and find his way out, but everything is spinning and sloping to one side or another. Earth and sky are the same mottled planes of dirty-black. There's grit in his eyes and dirt in his mouth. He traces the edges with his left hand. The hole is not even three feet deep, but he can't lift his head or get enough air to clear the ever-brightening haze. Sam's fading, and there's nothing he can do to stop it. He blindly lifts his arm out of the hole, pulling the discarded tangles of grass over him in a last-ditch effort to conceal himself just so he knows he fought to the bitter end.

He waits in what was supposed to be his grave, soaked in blood, heaving tears, for whatever comes next.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Merry Christmas!

Dean Winchester has a gun in one hand, a machete in the other and a fraternal rage tornadoing within.

He no longer cares if his mother discovers the unleashed killing machine decades of hunting and a stint in hell has created. He's getting his brother back or will die trying.

"Stay in the car," he barks to Mary as he closes the trunk.

But Mary's already armed and outside, stowing extra magazines in her pockets and throwing knives in her belt with iron determination. "I'm still your mother, Dean. And I'm Sam's too. Let's go get our boy."

The locator spell led them to a foreclosed corn farm in rural North Iowa, an isolating 20 miles from its neighbors. From the distance, Dean and Mary can see that it has been transformed into a compound. The small ranch home has been cleared of the climbing ivy that was overwhelming the house in Google Earth views. Broken windows have been covered with plywood; smoke curls pleasantly from the chimney. However, Dean sees stirrings of life on the west side of the centuries-old barn beyond broken down tractors and eroded fencing.

An ear-piercing scream splits the air, an octave too high to be Sam's, Dean hopes.

"We gotta go. Stay close, all right?"

"You kill civilians?" Mary asks with a bluntness that suggests she actually would.

"Only if they get in the way."

Mary nods and follows Dean through the darkness.

They creep forward through the shadows and skirt the edge of the floodlights. By the time they reach the barn, it's obvious that something has gone awry. A compound of this size should have at least a few guards, and yet they weave through the tight corridors of stables and make-shift rooms of the barn unobstructed. Dean, who's intent on cracking heads, is perversely disappointed.

Mary abruptly shoves him into a darkened stable. A beat later, a man wielding an axe bolts through the corridor they had just occupied. Dean darts to the other side of the stall, and clothes-lining him with an outstretched arm. He falls spectacularly, feet in the air, head slamming against the concrete floor, axe swinging wildly through the air. Dean knocks him and a few of his teeth out with a merciless kick to the face. Mary snags the axe and heaves it under rusted-out heavy machinery so it's no longer a threat. Together, they make a pretty kick-ass team.

They discover the bodies around the next corner piled around a destroyed door. The first, a white man with shorn brown hair is lying face down in a stomach-turning pool of blood, slackened hand pressed over a gruesome hole in his throat. The other, a woman with a tattooed hand, is alive, but bleeding so profusely from a chest wound that she won't be for much longer. Dean steps over her scrabbling legs.

She is not their concern.

Mary gasps as the woman falls still, lips darkening to a slate blue. "Did Sammy..."

"Hope so," his tone is clipped with an edge of meanness. Whatever Sam has to do to survive, Dean will applaud it.

The ravaged door barely budges when he throws his weight against it. He cautiously peers inside the hole, and sees a chair is wedged beneath it just beyond it is an unconscious woman. Dean manages to slip an arm through the hole without skewering himself, and he slides the chair free. He slowly opens it with Mary covering whatever comes out in her sights.

"Sammy?"

They both stop short, recoiling at the foul odor of burnt hair and human neglect. Mary lingers at the threshold, hand on her stomach. Dean morbidly wonders if the smell reminds her of her own fiery demise.

His gaze flickers about the freakin' dungeon where Sam has spent the past seventy-three hours. The scattered syringes, broken cattle prod, bloody coils of chains are all evidence of how his little brother spent his time as a captive. He nudges the woman with his foot. She's unresponsive, hair half-frizzed and half-soaked in dirty water, and after finding the ice-pick sticking out of her deformed ankle, that's probably the best thing that will happen to her today.

If Sam had done this, Dean's glad to see he's still strong enough to fight but the violence of it speaks to Sam's desperation. Sam doesn't kill lightly, and it perversely makes him even more scared.

"This was supposed to be a rescue mission. You're kinda killin' my hero complex! Sammy! Where you at?" Water sloshes on the floor as he walks. He stares at it with confusion. "Sammy! Sam!" He barks in John's tone of voice. "Oly Oly oxen free, dude!"

The room is an irregular rectangle, maybe eight-by-ten and empty save for the worktable and wrecked chair. There's nowhere in here for Sam to hide.

"We need to widen the search," Mary suggests.

They bind the guards, both living and dead, to a post in one of the stalls with the very chains they had used on Sam.

"If Sam's hurt, he'll go to ground until he can escape. He's around here somewhere; I feel it. We just have to find him. You stay here as a look-out, stay out of sight. I'll go check the perimeter." He produces a cell phone. He's spent the better part of an hour showing Mary how it worked. He opens the message app and hands it to her. "Text me if anything happens, okay? Don't forget to press Send after you type the message."

"I got it, Dean. Just go."

Weapon drawn, Dean rounds the perimeter of the barn. The floodlights are trained to the front of the compound, and behind the buildings, it's utter darkness. Under a flashlight beam, he soon discovers a trail of trampled grasses mottled with blood. He tracks it a dozen yards from the barn until he stumbles on the edge of a trench. Or a shoddy approximation of a grave.

_Oh God._

One quivering pass of his flashlight reveals pale, gigantic bare foot and a blood-stained cuff of jeans sticking out of the hole. Dean folds at the waist to vomit in the grass.

There had been a part of him that was resigned to the notion that he couldn't have his mother and his brother at the same time. They'd never existed on the same realms of Dean's life, and he couldn't imagine them together now. And in this moment, Dean knows who he wants more. "Sammy, don't you dare!" 

He's seen his brother dead before and wonders if the fourth or fifth time will be as painful as the first. As the flashlight skims of the body that's been dumped face-down in a too-small, sloppily dug grave, and poorly covered with weeds and dirt like discarded roadkill, the answer is it hurts even more than consuming the wicked power of a million souls, more than being torn apart by hellhounds, and more than the previous times combined.

Sam's clothes, the ones he was wearing as they parted ways days ago, are so saturated in blood and grime that Dean can't figure out how he died. Was he shot or suffocated or just succumbed to whatever prolonged nightmares they subjected him to. Crimson streaks the visible corner of his misshapen face like tears. They hadn't even bothered to fully free him of handcuffs before executing him.

Dean's openly weeping and trying to find the courage to pull him out of that grave.

He drops the flashlight and kneels at the edge. He reaches down and sweeps the weeds off Sam's body. His hand settles over the back that's still warm, damp… _and moving_.

"Sammy?"

His brother's giant body is awkwardly wedged in every space centimeter of that grave, and somehow and instantly later, Dean's jammed in beside him. He gently turns him on his side carefully to clear his airway. He fingers on his brother's throat. The pulse is erratic and weak, but there. Dean sweeps the wet clumps of Sam's hair off his face and uses the sleeve of his jacket to wipe away some of the blood and mud. He cradles Sam's face in his hands. "Stay with me. Please, Sammy."

Sam's brows knit at the sound of Dean's voice. Dean's encouraged enough to forego the triage in order to get him out of that damned hole. He gingerly arranges Sam's limbs so they're pillowed on his chest, noting the bloody leg ripe with infection, Sam's injured eye, and an unseen wound on his chest that's still bleeding. He lifts him beneath the armpits and gingerly hauls him out of the grave and towards the light.

His brother awakens fighting, and with a series of broken coughs when Dean's dragging him towards the house. He attempts to buck out Dean's grip with a hoarsely pleading "no more..." that gives Dean chills. Worried Sam's going to hurt himself more, Dean sinks in the grass, Sam's head braced against his chest. He intercepts Sam's left fist too. "Sammy! Calm down! It's Dean." He twists around so Sam can see him without moving his head.

Wild eyes meet his and he shakes his head, face a rictus of shock. "Aren't you dead?"

"I could ask you the same thing." Dean crouches closer and fights crazed laughter. "I'm gone five minutes and you get yourself kidnapped."

"Old habits," Sam mutters, grimacing in pain, clutching his arm to his chest. He grunts and drapes the other around Dean's shoulders and pushes up. "Get me outta here. Nownow."

Even with Dean's help, he's hobbling badly, breathing even worse and is radiating more heat than a space heater. Dean had forgotten about his mother until he feels the phone vibrate in his pocket.

"I brought back a souvenir," Dean says mildly. "You're not gonna believe it."

"Crappy t-shirt?" Sam replies.

"Lil' cooler than that."

By the time they reach the front of the barn, Sam's barely conscious. Dean settles him on the ground against the side of the barn.

Mary breaks out into a dead sprint when she sees Dean kneeling over a man. "Is that Sammy? Is he okay?"

Dean moves forward to intercept her. He isn't sure how to emotionally walk her through this reunion, especially with Sam so hurt. "He's been through a lot," Dean warns.

"I don't care. Move."

It's been a while since Dean had grappled with parental love, so he forgives himself for underestimating the fierceness of a mother. Mary hip-checks him aside and warns him off with a glare in impatience to reach her son. While Dean was physically sickened by the sight of his little brother, Mary doesn't even flinch at the sight of her youngest lying beaten and bloodied and nearly unconscious in front of him. She caresses his cheek much in the same way she did with him and presses a kiss to his dirt-smudged forehead. "Baby," she hums softly.

Sam's eyes flutter, and he cranes his head upward, staring at the visage of his mother impassively before they shift to nothing at all. A few moments pass between them in silence before Sam gapes at Dean. "D'you see her too?"

He huffs a laugh, which dies as he takes in Sam's streaming eyes and massive pupils. Drugged, concussed or both, Sam's not tracking well. "Yeah, dude. She's real, Sammy. Parting gift from Amara."

Out of all the reactions, Dean had been too overwhelmed to imagine, Sam clawing at the edge of the barn in a frantic attempt to flee is not the one that would ever land on the list of possibilities.

Mary jolts back too, aghast and upset.

"Can you just...give us a minute?" He digs the keys out of his pocket. "Just...b-bring the car around. It's okay, he's not firing on all cylinders right now. He doesn't mean it."

The second Mary's back is turned, Dean snags the back of Sam's muddy shirt, halting his desperate and pitiful retreat. "What? Sammy, tell me what's wrong?"

Hysterical is not a word Dean would ever associate with his brother until this moment when he's flailing with fear and dangerously close to tears. "Not like this, Dean, please. I'm a mess-monster…and…please, Dean. I don't want her to see me like…this." This isn't panic or delirium, but something more akin to shame and humiliation.

Dean's heart breaks at Sam's confession and he slinks closer to bundle his little brother against him who reeks of sweat and infection and blood. No matter how many lives Sam saves or sacrifices he makes, the world is intent on stripping him of his dignity and breaking his will. He has no idea what the British Men of Letters did to him, but it was more than enough to convince Sam that he's unworthy of anything but suffering. "Okay, okay. What if I clean you up a little? It won't be a Top Model makeover, but it'll be something, okay?"

Sam hiccups and shutters through his affirmation.

There are many reasons hunters wear layers, though post-hostage wardrobe change probably wasn't one of the intended uses. Dean whips off his jacket. He soaks the flannel beneath in holy water, and laves the blood and grime from Sam's face and forehead carefully avoiding wounds that have already coagulated. He cuts Sam out of the grimy shirts he's been wearing for days, cringing at the track marks, bulbous bruises, puncture wounds and freakin' burns that lie beneath. He splints fractured arm with bandanas and kindling from an aging bundle of firewood nearby. Removing the handcuff is trickier since the swollen limb has puffed up around the cuff and the lightest touch makes Sam yelp with agony. As he works, Dean fills Sam in on how and why Mary's miraculously alive and why the world hasn't ended.

When the cuff falls free, Dean bundles him in his camo jacket, zipping it up to the neck for both warmth and concealment of injuries. Sam determinedly lifts a shaking left hand to brush his stringy, blood-soaked hair off his forehead, and Dean tucks his behind his ears, arranging it around a gash on his hairline.

"Better?" Dean asks, giving Sam the last of the water from the flask.

"Nope. Get me up. Can't sit."

When Mary returns with the Impala, Sam has stubbornly risen to his full height and almost resembles a human being, though one who's still weeping blood from one eye. Mary opens the back door of the Impala. Dean steers him towards the car.

"M'sorry…" Sam says as Mary utters, "Sorry 'bout…" And it's Dean who's welling with tears.

"Don't worry about it, Sammy. Let's get you better."

She slides in the back with Sam, swaddling him in a blanket. By the time they hit the highway, Mary slides Sam down in her lap when he begins to have trouble breathing. "I got you, baby. Hang on, okay?"

He loses consciousness seven miles from the hospital and stops breathing after five more.

The first memory Dean has of riding in the car with his mother and little brother, he's driving 91 miles an hour down an Iowa highway towards the nearest hospital as his twenty-nine-year-old mother cradles her thirty-three-year-old son, breathing for him for two harrowing miles.

-SPN-

Dean's done this dance a dozen times, and he hates that he knows the steps.

He spouts lies to the doctors. This time it's hazing gone wrong instead of abduction and torture. He opts for the legit insurance that Bobby set up before he died instead of scam cards, because Sam's critical and needs extensive care, but even that comes with aliases to remember.

He sits in a lazily appointed waiting room that could be located in Idaho or Kansas or South Carolina sipping bad coffee and waiting for updates on respiratory function and debridement and brain activity.

Castiel flutters by his side sometime around dawn, wavering in his trenchcoat that's coated in a yellow dust and vaguely steaming . Dean glowers at him but doesn't move. The other occupants, a grim-faced man about Dean's age who keeps blotting his eyes and an older woman aggressively knitting in the corner, don't seem to notice his angelic entry.

Dean grinds down on the plastic arm of the chair until it cracks. "Where the hell have you been?" He growls under his breath.

"Io," Castiel answers in a gruff. "I do not recommend it."

Dean frowns. "Isn't that one of..."

"...Jupiter's moons? Yes."

He stands and quietly sets the magazine he wasn't reading on his seat and hauls Castiel out of the room and through the exit doors by his collar. The mission to rescue Sam had been a success, but Dean didn't get to punch off any of the volcanic rage churning just beneath the surface, and he's worried about an eruption now. "You had one job, Cas, the most important one in the friggin' universe."

Castiel's face creases in remorse so ethereally intense that Dean catches its guilt-ridden edge. "After the horrors of taking in Lucifer, I was not at my normal strength. The banishment flung me into the Milky Way," Castiel explains. "It seems as if I am always saying this, but I am sorry, Dean. How is Sam?"

"I don't know, Cas. I can't ask him because he was tortured for two days. Last I saw him, they were ramming a tube down his throat." He crosses his arms over his chest to keep from punching the angel in his face. Dean swallows down his ire and gazes out across the fence to the blue sky and the cars humming past on the freeway. From a distance, it looks as if they're skimming the horizon. "I need you to not be around for a while. I'm angry, Cas, and I'm trying really hard not to say or do something I'll regret. First Lucifer, and now Sammy's hurt. Again. You need to go."

Castiel's hanging head jerks upward. "I thought...you said it was a good decision to take on Lucifer."

Dean snorts. "Well life looks pretty damn different when you're staring down the barrel of an apocalypse," he sees Mary standing with the doctor and moves towards the doors.

"Is there anything I can do to...help?"

Dean halts, unable to look back but sees Castiel's reflection in the doors and the black-gold gleam of wilted wings. "I haven't had a chance to get back to the compound where Sam was held and scrub the place."

Castiel disappears in a gust of wind.

Dean ventures inside knowing Castiel is already forgiven.

The doctor describes Sam's condition as stable and guarded. Dean, however, is overwhelmed by the list of what Sam has endured.

The most serious ailment, the cauterized and now infected gunshot wound, has been debrided and surgically repaired. It won't heal pretty, but Sam will maintain full use of his leg as long as they can keep the infection from veering into sepsis. He's already responding to the antibiotics and is already breathing over the vent, which is encouraging. His lung was punctured, but they're confident it will heal with minimal scarring. Sam has been sedated to give his malnourished body a chance to focus on healing and recovering. It will also help while they flush a devastating cocktail of amphetamines and psychoactive drugs out of his system. The sedation will also help heal his punctured lid and scratched cornea. There are minor burns, bruises and puncture wounds that will require frequent bandage changes or monitoring but he's avoided skin grafts or internal bleeding. The broken arm has been set without surgery. Sam will have a cast for at least a couple of months.

Dean gleefully requests a lime green one.

It's another six hours before a nurse escorts them to Sam's room. Dean is grateful to see his little brother breathing on his own, scrubbed clean and face placid with sleep, even if it is bearded, bruised, stitched, and gaunt.

He sinks into the chair, head in his hands, and feels every scintilla of oppressive fear, dread and joy of the past few days. It's somehow too much and not entirely enough. His grips the hair on the back of his head, denying his body's aching urge to cry or puke or cackle like a madman until they lock him up in the psych ward. Instead he shores himself up for coming days of little sleep and buckets of terrible coffee.

A hand, small and delicate, rests on his shoulder and sweeps back and forth in a tranquil glide that slows the panicked beat of his heart. Mary's resurrection isn't just a singular event. Dean keeps forgetting about her, falling into the old grooves of life, and then she'll appear or call his name, and he relives the heart-soaring joy all over again.

Mary cocks her head in the direction of the cot in corner of the room in front of the empty closet. "You're dead on the feet, Dean. Grab a couple hours. I got him."

It's not an order so much as it is a reminder that Dean isn't alone, and that there's someone else to offer guidance and help carry the load. Dumbly, Dean obeys. He gingerly folds himself onto the cot. One wrong move and he'll shatter completely. He turns to face the wall. His eyes fill and flood as he settles against the pillow and whispers tremulously, "G'night, Mom."


	5. Chapter 5

Sam only knows shuttered, gauzy light and mottled colors. When he wakens, he's pain-free, deep in the middle of a feather-soft hug of blankets, and magically, Dean's rumbly baritone is gentle in his ear even though the rocking beneath him signifies that the Impala's in motion. He glides back into slumber before he can puzzle it out.

He rejoices in the blackness of sleep. He curls into it and wishes he won't wake, but when he does, there isn't much to behold: distant pain, a cool, calloused hand pressed to his forehead, a woman's voice that unfamiliar but mysteriously comforting. It's life with the volume turned down. And it's as much as his frayed psyche can tolerate.

Like ink flooding water, awareness begins to bleed into Sam's cocoon until it gradually unravels, and trauma descends. It starts with free-formed nightmares of frigid water and glistening needles and scooped out eyeballs squishing into a jar. It continues with insidious pain: a purple ache in his arm, a sharp throbbing in his leg, a jagged pressure in his chest, an itchy twinge in his face.

He wakes with a gasp and a whimper. His heart is pounding and the light sears his irritated gritty eyes. He tries to dash an arm over his face, but something unyielding and rough grates against his cheek instead of a hand. He blinks at the brilliant and baffling glare of lime green, tracing the shock of neon from his fingers to his elbow.

"Sammy?" Dean's gravelly tone helps cut through the grogginess. "You with me?"

"Mhmm," Sam's voice is just a series of scrapes and puffs that trail off into a hacking cough, but Dean beams as if he has just sung a flawless aria.

Sam's strengthless, hollow and melted into the mattress—all telltale signs that he's been out of it for days. In the past, Dean would be a visual reflection of how awful Sam felt, unshaven, sleep-deprived and shaky from anxiety and abusing too many vices. But he looks healthy and well-fed and edging on something Sam would pinpoint as happiness if that countenance occurs in anyone else but a Winchester. A strong hand slips behind his neck and shoulders to gently lift him up and stow another pillow behind Sam's head. His vision fritzes out like an old television at the new elevation, and he flushes with unbearable heat.

"Hang on, Scarlet. No swooning. Take a few sips." A straw is nudged in his mouth and Sam complies. "Hopefully that'll help keep things steady at least until you can handle food." The Powerade pleasantly quells the worst of the wooziness. Before Sam can panic over not remembering how he got to the bunker, Dean fills in the blanks. "It's Thursday. You've been catching Zs for about two days since the hospital. We drove you back...from Iowa."

_Cold, dirty water blasts on with a groan of pipes and he slams into consciousness fighting for air._

"They didn't let me sleep," Sam says numbly.

He glances around his room in search of...something. Sam runs his fingers through his hair in hopes of jumpstarting his sickness-sluggish mind to remind him why he feels like he's forgotten something important. The last week is little more than a jumbled haze of chaos and hopelessness, and an oddly pristine image of his mother holding him, concern pinching her young features. This image of her is vivid and imperfect, like a memory, instead of the faceless impression of love and warmth he feels when he dreams of her. His eyes flood with tears and he closes them, feeling the heavy-headedness and forced vulnerability of narcotics. "No more drugs," he demands.

"You're in pretty bad shape, man. You're going to need them."

"Messin' wit'my head. I thought...was Mom here?" Frowning tugs on stitches in his hairline. "Never mind...M'not makin' sense."

But Dean's expression is almost that of an excited puppy. If Sam could move his head, he'd be sure to find his brother wiggling a non-existent tail. "The hospital's just a blur, huh?"

"There was a hospital?" Sam quips.

"See, drugs aren't all bad. You missed me giving you a sponge bath." Dean grins. "Keep drinking, dude."

They fall into a companionable silence. Sam doesn't have the voice or the mental fortitude to process how grateful he is that Dean is alive or that he survived. So he sips his drink and grunts his thanks when Dean slips a folded blanket under his casted arm that's beginning to throb in time with his heartbeat.

"Do you want to talk about..." Gruffness over love to mask the concern.

"No," Sam says sharply.

There's a hesitant and small tap on the door. "Dean, can I come in…or…"

Sunshine doesn't penetrate the bunker that resides two stories beneath the surface, and yet a woman glides in a halo of light. Sam gapes at the figure standing hesitantly in the doorway in jeans, a sloppily large t-shirt, and one of Sam's old flannels. Goosebumps pepper his skin as he flashes back to the Impala, and the tightness of his chest, the agony everywhere, but he remembers wilting into the lap of a woman who cradled him fiercely, limpid green-blue eyes and whispered admissions of love somehow is a balm on the trauma that bled along with his wounds.

Sam sucks in a breath, gaze flickering from Dean to his mother and back again. "It wasn't a dream?"

"No, Sammy. Amara did it after I talked her down."

To say she's beautiful is an understatement. She's literally breath-taking. Sam has to remind himself to inhale and exhale. Tears stream down his cheeks and his hands shake from more than low blood sugar. He tries to sit up, but can only lift his head an inch off the pillow before he's too lightheaded to find up. He sags back against the pillow and tries to think of something profound to say instead. "Hi," he chirps, lifting three swollen fingers of his casted arm in a pitiful attempt to wave.

Mary smiles, and all Sam sees is Dean. "Hi."

Mary reaches his side and hovers uncertainly, but all it takes is Sam moving his left arm a little and she stoops down, gathering him up. She's thin, but strong. Her skin is soft and cold, not yet acclimated to the bunker's chilly climate. She smells of coconut and Ivory soap. And she's crying harder than he is. "My beautiful baby boy," she singsongs into his neck.

Sam gazes at Dean, who's red-faced and not even hiding the fact that he's crying too. Sam's so overjoyed, it circles back to a glorious sadness. "Best chick-flick moment ever, right?"

"Damn straight, Sammy." Dean settles on the bed, embracing them both.

They are a tangle of arms and casts and tears and flannel and laughter, and delighted to be so.

They are a family, united.

-SPN-

As many times as Sam has been fatally injured or psychologically tortured in The Cage and topside, recovery should be routine, like assembling furniture—follow these easy instructions to put yourself back together.

But there are no manuals for the human soul, and Sam's is far more damaged than the next. He imagines that it looks like his a bit like his the wound in his thigh: revoltingly inflamed, scorched sloppily sutured together by orneriness and martyrdom.

He stares at the gunshot wound until it loses its horror and shock, until he can see it and not immediately feel the unpleasant thump of the bullet's impact or feel the phantom weakness of the paralytic.

Until he no longer has the urge to gag at the haunting stench of his cauterized skin.

He hisses as he spreads the antibacterial over it and reaches for the sterile bandages Dean liberated from the hospital.

Sam's collected enough meager strength to take over his own ablutions. And he learned more about his captivity in its aftermath as the days are little more than a never-ending Picasso-esque blur of terror and torment. The British Men of Letters held him for just three days. The compound had been decimated in a mysterious conflagration ignited by the "freak lightning strike," according to the media. Toni Beville had been discovered in the Welsh woods, surrounded the dead bodies of the guards Sam had killed in his drug-addled desperation to escape, with no memory and clutching the murder weapon. Sam recognizes the tidy markers of a Castiel clean-up.

It was over, Dean had promised.

As Sam awkwardly wraps his thigh one-handed, deformed by a bullet and a fire, he wishes he could believe him.

_Sam's body is shutting down, cold, battered and exhausted, but he welcomes it. His eyes roll back in his head and he's drifting towards oblivion. There's a thunderous clang, wood hitting metal. Sam jolts back to his terrible reality to the smug simper of his torturer and this damned barn. "Where were we?" Sam sasses her and gets three deep slashes from a knife for his efforts, which only hastens the inevitable and desired end._

Sam jerks at the sound of Mary ducking into the room, and leans forward a bit to breathe through his mouth.

"Are you all right, Sammy?"

Sam swipes his free hand over his face, realizing he's panting, a little sweaty and half-dressed. He hurriedly tries to zip his hoodie one-handed to cover up the dark bruises, punctures and burns. "Um, yeah, just taking care of this."

He catches sight of her glimpsing at the injury, faintly green. "It's not as bad as it looks, I promise. I've been shot before."

Horrified, Mary flinches, nostrils flared.

Sam falters and reminds himself that he can't be as free with Mary as he can with Dean or even John.

While he likes waking up to hearing Dean and Mary's amicable yet hushed chatter, this is how their Dean-less interactions have gone when they try to venture beyond the jilted small talk of strangers. Sam doesn't know how to be a son-not to a parent who wants to learn who he truly is. With John, he always felt more like a soldier than a child, and he doesn't miss the irony that there's an emotional minefield preventing him from bonding with his mother.

Once John had learned what he was or what he would become, he stopped loving or respecting Sam. It was an ugly truth he'd accepted long ago, after John, knowing he was dying, had given Dean a heartfelt goodbye but left Sam with the final memories of raised voices and an exasperated "Get me a cup of a caffeine" dismissal. Sam accepted it and tried to forgive. A decade of catastrophically bad deeds later, Sam can't bear another parental rejection, especially when he's too tired to fight.

Sam stutters. "Uh…no, I was just…it's an occupational hazard, that's all."

"You should probably be back in bed."

Washing up and getting dressed one-handed has sapped his meager stores of energy. He stands, weaving a little as he balances on one leg, to hitch up his sleep pants.

Mary steadies him without hesitation, one hand on his waist, the other on just above his elbow. "Is this okay? I'm not hurting you?" She asks. Sam shakes his head. She gazes up at him in awe. "This is the first time I've seen you standing. You are...bigger than I ever imagined."

"Dean was pissed when I outgrew him," he says. He eases into bed with a groan. Mary snags his sling off the nightstand and wordlessly sits. Both of the bones in his are broken and his arm needs to be jarred as little as possible in the first weeks of healing.

Mary talks nervously while she helps him guide his arm into the sling, and tucks him in. "My father—you're named for him—he was barrel-chested and big…like you…"

_Toni's fingernails have been filed to taupe talons and dig into his cheek when she grabs his chin. "So you murdered your own grandfather?"_

_A hulking presence materializes behind him, and the chair is tipped backward and until he's flat against the ground, arms still chained and pinned beneath him. The chair back pinches and digs into his upper arms, his hands are instantly numb. Toni sneers down with dead-eyed callousness. "You deserve this, Sam."_

_Above him, the pipes groan and shudder. Water cascades downfall, hitting him with the intensity of a quarterback blitz. If the pressure working air out of his diaphragm wasn't bad enough, the stream is directly on his face and inescapable. Panic descends a second later when Sam can't draw breath. His suffering is punctuated by the staccato rap-tap of the chair legs thunking against the floor as he bucks and squirms to escape. He's still gurgling to keep water out of his lungs when he feels the gouge-and-burn arm. Silver sparkles before his arms, water catching the light on its nefarious descent, and gleaming on thin, angled blade as it slices and digs in deep. Sam arches a little, screaming and choking on water and pain, He blacks out, burning from the inside out and drowning on dry land._

Sam blinks away, hand pressed to his aching chest, the memory and re-focuses on his mother, who's still talking. "…want to know what your life was like with…John, and hunting. I want to know if you were happy or if it was hard. Sammy, I want to know everything."

_Happy._

Sam scoffs at the word. They've kept things light in deference to Sam's crisis and Mary's understandable shock, but now she's aching to plunge beneath the surface of saccharine small talk and glean some real knowledge about how her children fared without her. Though Sam's not sure she wants to the truth.

"Happy," he repeats. The word feels foreign in his mouth and stings like Toni's syringe. It imbues him with rabid anger so quickly, Sam's scared by it. He glances around his room, the one Dean had meticulously cleaned while he was unconscious to rid it of the sinister stink of Lucifer's grace, and he feels more trapped here than he had in that barn. Sam had to be rescued from the clutches of an organization that deemed him a threat to the planet, and his undead mom wants to know if he was happy as a kid.

His heart races and he licks his lips, trying to steady himself. "We were raised like you. As hunters," Sam responds tightly, trying to baby-step her there.

"I can't imagine John as a hunter. I know he was a soldier, but I never really saw that side of him. He was always so gentle."

_"If you walk out that door, Sam, don't ever think about coming back!"_

Anger rises and simmers within him like a low-grade fever. "Grief changes people." Sam rubs the back of his head as his headache intensifies. "Ya know, I'm pretty tired." He says dismissively.

Mary's shoulders slump. "Do you want me to leave?"

Sam turns away from her the best he can, and closes his eyes, and doesn't answer. He's not sure what he wants or what he needs. Maybe he just needs to try a little harder. "No."

She places a hand on his shoulder, offering tactile solace while remaining quiet. Sam is uncomfortable, riddled with healing pain, and all new wounds. He wonders what his life would've been like if Mary had never died. If the demons would've still come. If she would've distrusted him and hated him as much as John did. If it would've saved them any pain.

His mother is alive and holding him and he should be over the moon, but he's been broken and lazily reassembled so many times, that what starts out as joy metastasizes into festering dread, ire and fear by the time it reaches Sam.

Sam can feel the glow of her smile even though his back is turned. "I can stay as long as you like." She scoots up on the bed with him, and runs a hand tentatively through his hair. "You were bald as a baby. I remember you with just a few wisps of hair, and now it's so long. It's so beautiful."

Sam huffs a laugh. "Jess liked it long. I cut it for an interview, and she was pissed," he confesses sleepily.

"Jess? Is that the blonde in the pictures on your nightstand?"

"Mhmm."

"She's lovely."

Sam's accustomed to the flash-bang of misery that accompanies the memories of his girlfriend. "She was."

_"Jessica Moore died because you didn't have the bloody courage to tell her what you are," Toni declares, outraged. "You deserve this, Sam."_

_She reaches for the blade. Sam drunkenly shakes his head. Whatever they've given him changes his thoughts into involuntarily, audible sound. "Should be fire," he slurs._

_"As you wish."_

_And when the flame sizzles somewhere near his ankle, Sam denies himself the release of screaming until he can't fight that anymore either._

"You're shaking, Sammy, are you okay? Are you cold?"

Sam clenches his eyes shut as Mary leans over him to check his fever. She adds another blanket, too. "M'fine," he mumbles, turning his face into the rough cotton of his pillow. He can't do this.

_"You deserve this, Sam. All of it."_


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading. I hope you enjoy the final part!

At night, she drifts through the bunker like an apparition, pale and hollow, trapped between a life that left her behind a realm she doesn't understand.

Her hand is pressed firmly over her heart, fingers nudging against the ridge of her collarbone. It's been there so long, moisture slicks the palm.

On November 2, 1983, a mother relished in a quick shower, put on a nightgown, and nursed her fussy son who wasn't hungry. She cuddled him then, head positioned just above her heart and his oddly long body draped over her belly. He was content to gaze up at her with magically blue-gold eyes and sputter and coo, fighting sleep as if it were a violent siege. She remembers every minute of that night, tracing a beautiful Sammy's face with her finger, trying to track the changes in her little boy that seemed to pile up by the day. Breathing in his scent of power and Baby Magic and love.

She hadn't known what was coming, a broken promise, an evisceration, and a garbled last glimpse at her beloved husband her baby boy before she burned.

Anxiety wells up in her like the crashing of a swell on a beach, she presses down further on her skin until Mary knows there will be bluish half-moons there the next day. But it's the place where her children sought comfort and warmth. It's the last place she held her Sammy.

Just like the shiny and slick new world with pocket-sized portable phones and Star Trek computers, Mary doesn't recognize those fully grown men with battle scars and haunted eyes as her sons. She cannot find the bubbles of light that Dean used to emanate without even speaking. She cannot reconcile that the battered man with too-long hair and John's eyes is her youngest. Her baby boy.

She cannot exist in a world without her husband.

Mary wonders the bunker, hand still affixed over her heart, past Dean's room, idly exploring. At the end of the hall, she finds a bedroom that's been commandeered for storage. She slips inside, silently weaving through the rows of boxes and piled with dusty, unorganized junk. She rifles through a bit of it, finding mostly hunting paraphernalia and a few mementos. Most people have attics filled with dusty soccer trophies, art projects and sports equipment. But her sons have rusted guns, broken EMF meters, and a dungeon stockpiled with weapons and ward lockboxes.

Mary has conquered her denial and shock and gleefully embraced anger. She kicks the boxes full of junk until it topples over and the contents scatter, and momentarily contemplates dragging them outside for a massive bonfire.

Something in the closet gleams dully in the light of the hall. She drops a box of car parts to inspect it. The closet's contents are both mundane and yet bizarrely reverent—a dozen or so rumpled and patched shirts and sweaters neatly hung and placed inside so precisely that it feels wrong to disturb them. Her fingers trail over the soft cotton until it hits slick leather.

With a gasp, she slides the shirts back revealing John's beloved leather jacket, more battered than she remembers but intact. She pulls it off the hanger and presses it to her nose. It smells of his cologne and gunpowder. "How could you do this to them, John?" She whispers. "How?"

But she supposes John would probably ask her the same thing.

Even though she had fruitlessly tried during their marriage, she had never been able about her family's business or the reason why she always protective charm bracelets ("My mom gave me this, babe. I'll never take it off.") or how both of her parents had died on the same day ("The cops said it looks like a home invasion or a robbery gone wrong. There're no leads"). And now, she'd missed decades of her children's lives, Dean's first heartbreak, and Sammy's first steps. Sam has no recollection of her, while Dean's are all viewed through a golden prism of sainthood. Mary can't decide which one is worse.

She hangs the jacket back up, stowing the memories with it. Dean, who was mastering lid-less cups when she died now has an affinity for whiskey from the bottle, and she decides to tap into his stash so she can finally get some real sleep.

En route to the kitchen, she hears Dean—a near-permanent fixture at Sam's side—talking in low, placid tones. She peers into the room, hoping not to disturb them, and watches him pacify Sam. The list of Sam's injuries is dauntingly long, but Dean had nodded at the doctor like his little brother was simply diagnosed with a cold. It was a jarring glimpse at her sons' lives as hunters, and she desperately wanted to hear the anything to contrary.

It's always a relief to find Sam conscious and lucid since he spent nearly four days sedated or in a deep healing sleep. And now that he is, his eyes are fixed on Dean, and her eldest, who's all stone and steel, melts at the attention.

"I'm gonna get a complex if you keep lookin' at me like I'm a steak, Sammy. I'm all right, I promise," Dean says softly. "How're you doin'?"

Mary hears the rustle of covers and peers in the crack of the door to see Dean moving from the edge of Sam's bed to the floor, so Sam, who's sitting gingerly on the edge, won't have to twist to look at him. She slinks back into the shadows and listens. "Same shit, different day, Dean."

"Don't gimme that crap."

"It's the truth. I've done this before, remember? In a boat, in a cage. In a factory. On a stage."

"If you want to make me not worry about you, talkin' like freakin' Dr. Seuss ain't the way to go."

"I don't know what to tell you-"

"Start with what happened."

They're too engrossed in their conversation to notice her, so she steals as many glances as she can. The harshness of their tones and tone is the inverse to their body language. Sam holds himself tightly, still in a great deal of pain, but he is bowed towards Dean, like a light-starved tree. His bare and bandaged foot brushes against the bump of Dean's bended knee. "I can't..."

"Sammy...Mom says you won't even look at her. You're not eating. You're not talking. You're not hobbling around this bunker making me drag your ass back to bed. I'm scared for you, man. Let me help."

Sam shakes his head so his hair falls in his face. The fingers of his casted arm are balled into a bloated fist and from what Mary can see from Sam's eyes, the ones that remind her so much of John's, they fall anguished and aimless. His next few breaths are strained and sharp, like the hiss of pneumatic hinges. This has happened a few times in her presence, too. Sam had gone vacant and swaying, and it was obvious he's somewhere else entirely like he is now. It terrifies her. Dean, who seems to play his emotions close to the vest, clearly feels the same way. Dean holds his breath as he watches Sam drift.

The fugue lasts for a few seconds. Dean's on his knees the next moment, hands hovering but not touching.

Sam blinks, dazed, and stares at the room like he's never seen it before.

It's Sam who latches onto Dean's shirt like an anchor. "Sammy...Sam, hey? Are you with me?"

Sam nods, chin trembling. "Need to lay down," he whispers.

Dean is already arranging the pillows and helping him slide back. Once he's settled, Dean waits. The silence compels Sam to speak. "...it's just a lot, Dean. I worked so hard to deal with everything, ya know, and they...kicked it all up and shoved my face in it. I can't deal with... _Mary_ ," Sam says. Mary slinks back against the wall, swallowing down the pain it causes. Sam has never once called her "Mom." " …that's your thing," Sam whispers.

"She's our mother."

Sam laughs humorlessly. "I don't even know what that means, man."

Sam's voice sounds like rocks dragging against tree bark, and lifeless as if the will had been bled out of him. And Mary finds this audible agony more nauseating than her son's broken body. She didn't want to know if John had re-married because she couldn't imagine another woman raising her boys, but knowing that Sam had been mother-less, sensing his palpable loneliness, is worse than the fire.

"Maybe...um...what if we got you some help? Cas could heal you and wipe the memories-"

Sam glowers at Dean sharply, lip twisting in disgust. "Fuck Castiel."

"Sammy..."

"He's not welcome in this bunker, and he's certainly never coming near me again." Dean sputters to interrupt, but Sam is emphatic and irate. "He, more than anyone, knew what I went through in The Cage, but he still set him free. I could've accepted it if it had worked, but it didn't do anything."

"I get it, Sammy. I do." There's a rattle of springs, the shift of covers. "We're gonna go slow, okay? Lots of sleep, some Netflix binges, and no hunting. Just really easy for now. How's that sound?"

Sam grunts.

"Calm down, man, you're gonna hurt yourself," Dean deadpans. Mary peers back into the room and sees Dean sitting in a chair beside the bed. "You're eating when you wake up. You're already too skinny," Dean says, fussing with his pillows. "Close your eyes. Think of hot lady lawyers or the Library of Congress."

Dean gently places his hand on Sam's chest, skin-to-skin, with a pressure that whitens the bed of his nails. The gesture is so poignant and so sweet, she's greeted with images of Dean scaling Sammy's crib to nap with him so he'd be safe from monsters. And she's assaulted with the notion that Dean might've raised Sam, too. And that he's homesick for that innocent little baby just like she is.

"I'm here, Sammy. Bunker's re-warded, locks are changed and the perimeter alarm is workin' again, and big brother's armed to the teeth. You're safer than the Queen. Girly-er too."

Mary's fairly certain the gesture Sam makes with his middle finger still means the same thing in 2016 as it did in the '80s. She smiles. Dean seems proud, too, and when Sam closes his eyes, he starts humming a wistful tune she knows all too well. "Yesterday" by the Beatles.

She'd been ripped from their lives by circumstance, tragedy and her own cowardice, but maybe she wasn't forgotten.

And now she has a second chance.

She heads into the kitchen and pours of two cups coffee instead of booze and heads back into Sam's room. She offers it to Dean and joins him, glad to see Sam's already asleep. In that moment, during a sugary sip of Dean's cheap Columbian roast, Mary knows that it's time to stop dwelling on her own grief, so she can be a mother to two grown men who desperately need it.

"Two questions: what's Sam's favorite food? And does that...interweb-thingie have recipes?"

-SPN-

Sam is livewire, triggered by every shift in the wind or errant sound. There's a logical part of him that understands the science of it, that his body is protecting him from future violence but it doesn't make the constant red-alert any less real or debilitating.

Sam crouches on the floor between his bed and his nightstand and clutches his phone, trying to ignore the thunderous swoosh of water rushing through aged pipes.

The phone vibrates in his grip and he frantically checks the message. "ETA 30 minutes."

Sam hobbles about the room dumping medical supplies, boxers, painkillers and hoodies into a bag. He snags his one crutch and hopes to slip out while Dean is in the shower and Mary is asleep.

His anxiety is only worsening, and despite the fact that he's been home for almost two weeks, he's not any more stable than when he was lying half-dead in a grave. The flashbacks drag him back to that barn to relive those horrors in IMAX HD. Sometimes the memories are tangled together or Lucifer in Toni's pants suit and sensible heels or the comely Brit with Lucifer's grace.

Sam shouldn't be bearing weight on his leg, but he does anyway. The strap of the bag presses into bruises and stitches in his chest and shoulder, but he swallows it down and turns to leave.

Dean looms in the doorway, half in shadow, toothbrush hanging out of his mouth. His eyes, a gleaming lime in the light flicker to Sam's untied sneakers and the bag on his shoulder. "Tell me you're friggin' sleepwalkin'?"

Adrenaline floods his bloodstream, and he replays Dean's words a few times to make sure he heard him correctly. Did he mean to sound so menacing? He backs up and changes his grip on the crutch just in case he needs a weapon. "I need to go...for a while."

Dean's face is expressionless. "You're not even supposed to be out of bed, so I don't know why you think up for travel."

Sam takes a step forward but Dean doesn't yield. "Dean, please." His heart starts to race. He abandons the backpack and clears his throat with difficulty. "Jody's dad has a lake house just a few hours from here, and she's giving me a ride."

"Well, what about Mom. She's tryin' really hard, man..."

"And she'll be here when I get back. For once, Dean, stop fighting me! I can't...I need to go."

Dean flings his toothbrush into the garbage and starts yelling. Water from his hair has stained the crew neck of his t-shirt a dingy gray and Sam shudders as his skin puckers with goosebumps and he tastes the foul earth of unfiltered water...

_Footsteps splat against the waterlogged floor. Sam processes arcs of light and dark but is too depleted or drugged to move or speak. "If he's as dangerous as they say, how do we know he's out?" an accented voice mutters oddly close to his left ear._

_He's uncuffed and dumped onto the floor. "That's 'ow." Smoke-stained laughter roils over his head. "You'll never make it in this gig if you're scared of your own shadow." Large hands roam his body, unbuttoning his pants. Antiseptic is an acrid tingle in his nostrils. "Just do what they say, and you'll be fine. They say, 'keep 'im alive,' so we'll do our best." There's another pinch of a syringe in his buttocks._

_"Bloody hell, his eyes are open."_

_"All the shit they're givin' him is fryin' his brain like bacon. I reckon we'll have to dig the grave next. Ne'er seen a bloke last this long. But watch," And he's cruelly kicked, but it only registers as detached pressure under his armpit. "Give it a whack. Gotta get used to the grisly stuff. It's a lot easier when they don't squeal."_

_A boot crunches down near a shoulderblade, forcing out a grunt of him as Sam flops awkwardly on his stomach, face mashed into musty gray cotton. Water leeches into the fabric, blackening it before dribbling into his mouth. His teeth scrape against it when he's kicked again._

_"'S not so bad, I guess."_

Sam reels back, gulping air. Sweat drips from his pores, snaking down his back and beads on his upper lip. Dean's voice is all treble and bass. "...not what I meant. Look, I know you're hurting but why do you always do this? Why do you shut me out?"

Sam rakes his hand through his hair and battles the reflex to tear it out by the roots. "Why would I bother telling you anything when you never listen? I'm standing here white-knucklin' it trying to do what I need to do and you're fighting me. I'm tired, Dean. I'm so freakin' tired I'm tempted to go walk into traffic so I'm going to go get my head straight and I'll come back when I'm ready."

Dean crosses his arms. He's a hulk in the doorway, a lock and a barn door, trapping him. "You won't even tell me what happened, and you want me to let you walk out that door?"

"You don't want to know! You just want me to be magically okay so I can fall into this bullshit Hallmark family reunion. Mary's your miracle. She's not mine!"

"Our mother died for us...for you..."

Sam had been at war since he'd left that barn, possibly since the day he'd learned the truth about his mother's death. He'd been fed sainted stories about the great Mary Winchester and likened her to a Disney princess or Joan of Arc, sparkling and fleeting and so gallant that the world didn't deserve her. But the truth of it is, she's a down and dirty Winchester just like him and just like Samuel. So Sam stops fighting and embraces the rage that left him spurned as a teenager, made him lethal as a hunter, and is killing him now. "No, our mother made a deal with a demon and started this entire mess!"

There's a tightness around Dean's face that usually comes before he punches someone. Dean had never mastered self-control, so Sam braces for it. Dean launches a fist into the door instead. The wood splinters and his knuckles tear on impact.

The blood lilts down the marred road in crimson streaks, and Sam's bewitched by it.

_Ragged coughs shear through his lungs. Sam flounders in the half-light, leaning forward to choke out the wetness. Bile swirled with red blood stains joins the other unsavory stains on the lap of his jeans._

Dean rocks back and forth on the balls of his feet to burn off nervous energy. When he speaks again, it's with patronizing calm. "I want to know, Sammy. I just didn't want to push. I was trying to avoid…well…this!"

"If I tell you, will you let me leave? Here we go: Toni shot me in the library. The bullet was laced with a paralytic so taking me was a piece of pie. They chained me to a chair and questioned me. If I didn't answer, the burned, choked or stabbed me. When I didn't like the answer—and they never liked them—I got more of the same. When I passed out, they blasted me with water or doped me up, so I could keep going. It was really just a prolonged trial and execution rolled into one with drugs and waterboarding and electric shock and blowtorches tossed in for fun. So I figured, 'my brother's dead, why fight it?' And I was confronted with everything I'd done. Everything I worked so hard to forgive myself for. And even now, without wanting to be, I'm riddled with it. I'm stuck in that damn barn. I can still smell it...and it feel it," Sam says. His nose is running and he's shaking so hard he can barely stand, but he's empowered for the first time in weeks, and he can't stop if he tried. "But then I remembered what I didn't do: I never made a deal. I never sold my soul to the lowest bidder. But you did. Dad did. Mary did. So I'm sorry if I don't want to bake cookies with you and..."

"Mom." Dean gasps, interrupting Sam.

A stricken Mary is pressed against the wall. Her expression mirrors the pale disgust etched into Dean's face. Sam leaps on the opportunity, limping towards the door. Dean flattens a hand over his chest, silently and gently halting his retreat.

Sam can't stomach the idea of violence, and Dean's exploiting that.

"We're just...talking. Can you give us a minute?"

Mary's regards Sam with wide, haunted eyes and a trembling chin. "Are you going somewhere?"

"I need to leave. I can't...I just need a break. _Please_ ," Sam confesses. He tosses out and "I'm sorry" even though he doesn't mean it.

He's not sure what he expects from this woman he's supposed to love more than life but feels nothing for, but even he's thrown when she nudges Dean aside and takes his bag from his arm, slinging over her own. "Do you pack socks? I always forget socks."

Stunned, Sam just nods. "I'm a good packer."

Mary smiles, and Sam's once again clobbered with the fact that she's younger than him. "Good. Come on. I'll help you with the stairs."

Mary matches Sam's turtlish speed, hand on his elbow as he hobbles down the rounded halls. The walls are wobbling closer and closer together, threatening to blockade the hallway and them inside. "I can't breathe...help…"

"Yes, you can, Sammy. Look, we're at the stairs. Almost there." Mary flings the bag away, and wraps an arm around his waist, and promises, "I'm stronger than I look. Lean on me, okay?"

Sam doesn't want to, but he's still pathetically weak and hyperventilating so intensely that he's dizzy. They climb ever upward until finally, the air that makes it in is fresh and green instead of stale and mildew.

The sunlight is blotted out by twists of frothy clouds. He gulps and jitters, shirking off the claustrophobia of the bunker and the onslaught of anxiety. Mary props him up on an overturned metal barrel. "I'm gonna go get your bag. Stay here and breathe, okay, baby?"

Sam coughs out an affirmation and leans forward wheezing for air. He tries to focus on something else besides the misfiring memories in his brain and gazes out at the warbling verdant of the trees that sound the bunker, particularly the fledgling tree a few feet away.

The leaves are bug-eaten and patchy from being planted late in the season just before an early cold snap. Sam had planted it for Charlie, and it's a gruesome irony that he couldn't even do that right. Mary stands nearby, clutching his travel bag. She says nothing as Sam regains his breath and composure. "Sorry…anxiety attack."

"They were called 'nervous breakdowns' in my day," Mary says awkwardly. "I-I hope I'm not the reason you're leaving, Sammy...Sam," she corrects.

"Not the biggest one. I just…things were pretty heavy before you came back," Sam explains. He can't remember a time when he wasn't burdened with the weight of the world.

"You can tell me anything you want, and I won't judge."

Every now and then, Sam actually lets himself wallow in how shitty his life is, and how he wishes he could be anything else, even that poor excuse for a memorial tree. "You won't look at me the same way I did."

Mary's suddenly in front of him. "Is that what you're scared of? Sam, you're my son. I love you. That's the one thing that will never change."

His lip trembles and he shakes his head in feverish despair. "Dad didn't."

"Look, baby, I don't know what happened after I was gone. I know things are beyond complicated, but there's nothing you can tell me that would change the way I feel about you. I made you, Sam. I carried you just under my heart."

Sam doesn't trust it. He's heard honeyed words of dedication, and he's seen them wither away without a second's explanation. So why not hasten the inevitable? "That's what the yellow-eyed demon did to me. He turned me into a vessel for the devil—that's not a metaphor by the way—I mean, the actual devil. My whole purpose for living was to bring about the end of days."

Mary lifts her arms and gestures to the green pastures and sapphire sky. "Seems like you did a pretty bad job."

"But..."

Mary smiles sadly, suddenly standing in front of him. "Nothing, Sam. And you're forgetting one thing."

"What?"

Mary tips his chin up so he's looking directly at her. "None of it is your fault."

Stunned, his mouth falls agape.

For the Winchesters, love had always come with a pre-ordained set of rules and hefty price-tags violating them. As much as he loves Dean, there are still caveats to its reciprocation. In a world with monsters and devils, Zanna and angels, the fairytale had always been unconditional love.

Sam shakes his head and tries to look anywhere but those beseeching blue eyes, tries to hide the panicked, wet cadence of his breath. "It's always my fault," he says into the breeze. Sam tries to stand up, but Mary hovers in front of him, hands on both of his shoulders. She holds his face in both hands. "You need to hear this, so I'll keep saying it. None of it is your fault. Not Jessica's death, not Lucifer, not any of it. It's mine. You were just trying to live your life. I'm so proud of you for the choices you've made...for surviving it. If anyone expects more, even Dean, you send them to me, and I'll kick their ass."

With the smallest sigh, Sam's resolve splinters and he's crying. He presses his face into Mary's middle, wrapping his good arm around her as visceral emotion pours out of him. Sam's not sure what will happen an hour from now or even next week, but maybe this is the starting point for healing the wounds that hurt the most, not the broken arm and punctured lung, but the aching fissures in his soul, the voices in his head that constantly tell him he's not good enough or strong enough.

A car pulls up near the bunker and honks tentatively.

Sam tries to pull back but Mary just embraces him tighter and presses a kiss to the top of his head. "You're allowed to be angry at me if you need to. I can take it. Like I said, I'm stronger than I look."

Sam shakes his head abortively. "I still need to go."

Mary wipes his burning face clean with the tails of her sleeve. "The door's always open for you to come back," she says with a smile and rises to introduce herself to Jody and stow his bag in her truck.

Sam stands and lets the breeze wash over his face as something special and delicate blooms within. Sam's not sure what it is, but he thinks it's the joy of being a son, of having a mother.

And he finally realizes this is what he deserves. 

_Fin._


End file.
